Meru makes first move on enterprise 802.11n WLANs

The first enterprise-class wireless LAN products supporting the IEEE 802.11n draft standard, and promising data rates of 300Mbps, have been announced this week by Meru Networks.

Meru says it will ship this summer a two-radio access point, a five-blade controller and new software that handles wireless data traffic at the edge of the network instead of routing all of it through a central wireless controller.

The new draft 11n products will be showcased at the Interop Las Vegas show later this May. They won’t be cheap. The new access point will be priced at about $1,500, which is nearly two times the price of Meru’s current high-end 802.11a/b/g access point. Pricing for the new controller is expected to be about $65,000.

Bluesocket last year introduced an enterprise access point based on the same technology that forms the heart of the 11n high-throughput project. And there are some “draft 11n” or “pre-11n” WLAN products already on the market today. But these are typically aimed at home or small business office networks, which usually are created using just one access point. Data rates range from just under to just over 100Mbps. Meru executives say that deploying 11n in big enterprise WLANs could mean upgrading wireless switches and possibly even parts of the wired switch fabric, because of the greatly increased 11n throughput.

Risks of going prestandard

The company is taking a risk marketing a product that complies with only a draft, and not a final, IEEE standard. But two considerations may outweigh the usual enterprise demand for standards-based products. One is that the IEEE 11n working group earlier this year approved draft 2 of the high-throughput standard. WLAN vendors and industry experts say they expect very few changes, and expect those changes to be made via software updates, between now and the final standard in 2008. And the Wi-Fi Alliance is about to begin certifying interoperability between draft 2 11n gear, as it has done for the 11a/b/g standards.

Second, 11n wireless LANs promise a very large increase in data rates and useable throughput. With the standard 20-Mhz channels for 802.11, users of 11n gear should see minimal data rates in the 100-150Mbps range, compared to 54Mbps for 11g and 11a WLANs today. But using 40-Mhz channel option specified in 11n, with a 3-antenna setup for each WLAN device, will double that to 300Mbps.